You can picture the splashy tabloid headline now: "Girl saved by Cults!"

It's a switch, but vocalist Madeline Follin can testify that her band, Cults, absolutely saved her from the fate that's beset so many twentysomethings set adrift in the wake of the great recession.

The sentiment shows up in her lyrics - about alien kidnapping ("Abducted"), a fear of leaving the house ("Go Outside") and skittish ventures into the darkness ("Walk at Night"). Those dulcet haunters echo the sounds and sentiments of Patsy Cline, the Shangri-Las and girl-group crooners who've bravely articulated the anxieties of making one's way through the modern world.

"Most of the songs were just about what I was going through at the time," Follin, 23, says sweetly from San Diego during a brief break from Cults' two-year touring schedule. "Maybe it was paranoia, but it was my last year of college when we first started writing songs, and you'd visit your family at home - we (she and bandmate Brian Oblivion) were both studying film - and it was, 'What are you going to do with that?' And it would be, 'I don't know!' It's the anxiety of growing up and people telling you you have to make decisions about the rest of your life."

Fortunately for Follin - who spent her childhood in San Francisco and moved back later to attend San Francisco State - Cults came along two years ago, while she and Oblivion were attending the New School in New York City. "It was just, 'Let's do something creative for once,' " she remembers. "We kind of went into it with no set goal and wrote 30 songs."

After editing down that wildly varied batch of tracks, things moved quickly. Cults put out a self-titled EP that gathered praise from Pitchfork and - with the release of its self-titled long-player on Lily Allen's Columbia imprint - captured the attention of artists like Portishead and Battles, both of which picked the group for their respective ATP festival lineups.

Attribute Cults' growing popularity to Follin's tenderhearted vocals, Oblivion's pop hooks and the duo's ear-teasing way of layering samples of cult leader rants, glimmering synth effects and tinkling vibe runs in an eerily familiar yet delightfully fresh way. Still, Follin never would have suspected she'd be making a living in a band, though she grew up looking up to and recording with musical family members: her stepdad Paul Kostabi (White Zombie, Youth Gone Mad, Psychotica) and older brother Richie Follin (Willowz, Guards).

"I think Brian and I always wanted to do something music-related. I don't know if it was low self-esteem, but we didn't think it was possible," Follin says. "When we got over that, it was a whole new set of anxieties. Now it's an anxiety about performing live or making the next record."

Follin says she's itching to finish touring and get back to the studio to write new music: "We've been playing the same songs for two years, and it's not much of a creative outlet - it's amazing and really fun, but it's kind of like being a monkey onstage doing the same thing every night."

The band can find solace in the fact that it's stood up to skeptics and has a genuine following. "We have real fans now," Follin says happily. "Not just people who are coming to the show to judge and see what's up." Safe to say that Cults have a bona fide cult? She laughs, joking, "Yeah, we're going to start passing around Kool-Aid packets at shows!"